April 28, 2011 – 10:27 pm
This post highlights my discovery of one of the weirest ways to bring a computer back to the functioning state. My problem started when I woke up this morning to a complete power outage as a result of wind storm that took place in the Hamilton region last night. Unfortunate for me, I had ignored the high wind warnings sent out last night and had left my desktop running to crunch away at some data. With no surge protection, I can’t say I was surprised to see that the computer would fail to turn on when the power was restored in my area. The problem in my case was a continuous blinking light on the power supply of the unit (Depending on the power supply, you may not have the light). In the normal state, this light should emit a steady green glow to indicate a properly functioning power supply (picture shown below). With almost no hope of fixing the computer without replacing the power supply, I decided to look around on the web and found a tip involving a hair dryer.
Tags computer, electricity power supply, fried, Green light, hairdryer, HP A805n, Power Supply, power surge, pulsing light, surge protector, won't start
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April 27, 2011 – 10:21 pm
With the end of my second year of the Health Sciences program at McMaster University came a plethora of new information that I will no doubt forget in the coming months as I try my best to play a year’s worth of video games in four months, but there are a couple lessons I won’t ever forget. The first is not to procrastinate, because it comes back to bite you during exams; unfortunately, simply remembering this fact is not sufficient to get me to stop procrastinating. The second is the importance—the vital importance, of exercise in day to day life. It is one thing to have this repeated to you time and time again as we watch reality TV shows of fat people competing to lose weight, or doctors explaining that exercise lowers your risk of multiple age-related diseases, but it is quite another to have approached the effects of exercise from multiple directions, only to converge at the absolute truth that a healthy life and an active life are one and the same.
April 19, 2011 – 11:19 pm
So, you proudly rip non-downloadable audio streams by placing a microphone near your computer’s speakers eh? Unfortunately, you might have noticed that this method results in a significant loss in sound quality in addition to a lack of stereo sound (A big disappointment if you were thinking of placing the final product in a mp3 player). So, what other methods are there to capture sounds from a webpage when you do not have access to a download link? Meet SoundFlower, an open source software available for Macintosh hardware running OS X 10.5+.
